As a side tangent, I noticed lately that over a half of the distance I used to drive on a normal day, would take nearly the same time if I just walked, due to insane traffic.
For example, my morning work commute takes about 25 minutes by car, about 12 minutes by bicycle, and about 30ish minutes just walking briskly. This is because at least 60% of the “driving” is just sitting in traffic, so even though I can drive much faster than I can walk, it does not matter much. The car in traffic is not really a vehicle to move around in, but a movable couch to sit on while waiting.
This is especially true in the age of Google Maps and some such, which allows me to plot my walk/bike-ride through shortcuts that would be impossible to use if I was driving a car.
Running could probably be about 40% faster than walking in such circumstances, making driving all but pointless, unless I need to transport heavy loads or the weather is truly atrocious (but then again, atrocious weather makes driving yet harder and less efficient anyway).
Going Durden
Some stupidly obvious hacks that worked for me. Most were designed to help me push through ADHD issues, but would be just as useful for neurotypicals:
5 minute super intense cardio, as a replacement for long, low intensity cardio. It is easier to motivate oneself to do 5 minutes of Your-Heart-Might-Explode cardio than two hours of jogging or something. In fact it takes very little motivation, if you trick yourself into doing it right after waking up, when your brain is on autopilot anyway, and unable to resist routine.
pile stuff by the door, or put it in your shoes so you cannot leave the house without them.
download some kind of a Reminder App for all your devices, preferably one that can be cross-linked between them, but still functional when the cloud is not available. This has saved my bacon more than once, I externalized nearly all my memory this way, which is a huge stress relief in the long run.
take a page from the insane-prepper doomer book, and pile up on long lasting consumables, especially the ones that you will be buying anyway. If you have enough room, stock on hundreds of kilos of sugar, flour, mineral water, dry pasta, rice, coffee, toilet paper, soap etc etc. Not only is this cheaper that way, but reduced the hassle of running out of things at annoying times. This applies to tried and tested shoes and clothing as well.
hydration problem. A lot of people, like me, have issues drinking enough water. My solution is to by a ton of soluble tablets (electrolytes, multi-vitamin, potassium, calcium, magnesium etc, does not matter as long as they are sugar-free), then use one of each daily, dissolved in a tall glass of water. These things taste as good as soda, but are (marginally) good for your health, and trick you into drinking water.
whenever you are using anything with a screen, make sure that it is ABOVE your eye level, so that you are forced to sit straight and look up. Not only is that better for your spine, but helps with alertness. This is especially important if you are forced to use a computer long past your natural bedtime.
I notice I fail to see a difference between Deep Honesty with Reasonable Caveats, and just ol’ regular Shallow-ish Honesty that allows small bits of Deep Honesty when convenient (which is something all of us do reflexively). If you (reasonably) refrain from being Deeply Honest in all situations where being so would be tactless, cause you harm, harm others, divulge sensitive information that should not be shared, and damage social relationships, you are left with very few options in which to exercise Deep Honesty (which would basically only include conversations with your therapist and writing LW comments).
I have a strong intuition that in order for Deep Honesty to work and not horribly backfire, society would have to be first restructured to make it possible, specifically by making it impossible (or just awkward and ineffective) to punish people for their Deep Honesty and honestly shared views.
Without AGI, people keep dying at historical rates (following US actuarial tables)
Im not entirely convinced of this being the case. There are several possible pathways towards life extension including, but not limited to the use of CRISPR, stem cells, and most importantly finding a way to curb free radicals, which seem the be the main culprits of just about every aging process. It is possible that we will “bridge” towards radical life extension long before the arrival of AGI.
possibly, but is that not basically a No True Rationalist trick? I do not see a way for us to truly check that, unless we capture LW rationalists one by one and test them, but even then, what is preventing you from claiming: “eh, maybe this particular person is not a Real Rationalist but a Nerdy Hollywood Rationalist, but the others are the real deal,” ad nauseam?
I definitely agree that people who consider themselves Rationalists believe themselves to be Actual Rationalists not Hollywood Rationalists. This of course leads us to the much analyzed question of “why aren’t Rationalists winning?” The answers I see is that either Rationality does not lead to Winning, Or the Rationalists aren’t Actual Rationalists (yet, or at all, or at least not sufficiently).
A major case in point is that Rationalists mostly failed to convince the world about the threat posed by unrestricted AI. This means that either Rationalists are wrong about the AI threat, or bad at convincing. The second option is more likely I think, and I wager the reason Rationalists have a hard time convincing the general public is not because the logic of the argument is faulty, but because the delivery is based on clunky rhetoric and shows no attempts at well engineered charisma.
The Stevia-drink issue is likely psychological in nature not blood-sugar related. You would have to be tricked by a third party to drink a stevia soda unknowingly, and inversely, be tricked into drinking sugary soda while thinking it is stevia based; then compare the results.
In my own diet journey I noticed similar trend: knowingly eating or drinking substitutes of things I like makes my subconscious throw a tantrum and demand the real thing anyway. I think it is more about self-resentment over being tricked, than the actual taste or content.
Just giving up the thing completely, both the real thing and substitute hurts more at first, but makes it easier to form a habit (for example, replacing soda not with stevia soda but with plain water). Some minds find purposeful “asceticism” of a diet easier than “pretend abundance” of the replacement products.
some counter-arguments, in no particular order of importance:
Verbal communication is quite often more succinct, because it is easier to exhaust the vocal medium, and you can see in real time your conversationists getting bored with your rambling.
Verbal communication allows far more nuance carried with tone, body language, and social situation, thus often delivers the message most clearly. I find it most useful when discussing Ethics: everyone is a clinical utilitarian when typing, but far more humanistic when they see the other person’s facial reaction to your words.
Rhetoric and charisma do not carry well over text. Most Rationalists consider it beneficial, right until the point where they need to explain something, or convince non-Rationalists and completely lack the tools to do so. Avoiding the use of verbal rhetoric and not training your in-person charisma is the surefire way to become very unconvincing to the general audience: case in point, every attempt by explain AI Risk to “muggles” by somewhat introvert and dry-talking Rationalists.
Related to point 3: conversational charisma is the main tool used by human males to woo women. By not practicing conversational charisma, Rationalists ensure they will breed themselves out of existence.
Most child-rearing and education is oral communication. Without practicing it, the Rationalist will not make a good parent or a teacher, and thus, from civilizational perspective, had squandered his rationality.
Rubberducking: saying things out-loud quite often leads to epiphanies, especially negative ones (“wow, my cherished idea sounds really dumb when I say it out, loud.”). Writing down, and then reading your own ideas often leads to an emotional feedback loop in which you reinforce your own conviction rather than nit-picking your own idea. This leads to...
Oral communication avoids the risk of Rabbit-Holes. When writing, uninterrupted, it is easy to accidentally pick a logical mistake as the crux of your whole argument, and waste hours exploring it. In conversation, your partner/opponent can snip that in the bud.
Op-Sec. Oral conversation is far less likely to get you in trouble for the things you say, unless you are being recorded. Meanwhile, a text based conversation, especially on a social platform is a Sword of Damocles always hanging over your head. Say the wrong thing, and at worst a dozen people will consider you an ass. Write and post the wrong thing, and you might, decades from now, lose your job, your social standing, or even your life. An innocent comment today might make people cancel you in 2040, or a vengeful Basilisk mulching you in 2045.
There is also the fact that we already are, effectively, controlling our own genetic pressures through culture and civilisation. Our culture largely influences our partner choice, and thus, breeding. Our medical sciences, agriculture, and urbanization takes pressure off survival. So the eugenic/dysgenic/paragenic process is in effect anyway, just… stupidly.
Some simple examples:
- agriculture pushes us to be lactose tolerant and carbohydrate dependent
- art and media dictates our sexual choices and mate choice
- education creates pressure for intelligence, but a very specific kind of one.
- in the long run, contraception methods might pressure a further evolution of our reproductive systems (ex: sooner or later, women with extremely unlikely mutations that allow them to “beat” the contraceptive pill will outbreed those who do not share such mutation. )
Im particularly interested in how our sexual culture effectively works as a secondary “blind goddess of eguenics”. For likely the first time since the Neolithic (or possibly since forever), we have reached an age in which women are free to chose their male partners based on physical attraction and mental kinship, not social pressure and need for survival. Assuming this trend continues, and we do not relapse into social conservatism, I expect a rather sudden (by evolutionary standards) shift in male choice, and thus sexual dimorphism.
Atop of that, we the rise of affordable In Vitro fertilization, we effectively are using conscious Eugenics, one specifically geared towards the needs of women and couples, rather than society at large. We are entering an age when the human male is not strictly necessary for breeding, or his offspring’s survival, and thus, with the exception of the rare super-specimens who are sperm donors, men no longer fall under any evolutionary pressure, and do not really need to exist.
The decades between the moment when in-vitro becomes the norm, and the moment when artificial wombs become the norm, will be very interesting indeed.
Such communities are then easily pulverized by communities who value strong groupthink and appeal to authority, and thus are easier whipped into frenzy.
I mostly agree with you, though I noticed if a job is mostly made of constantly changing tasks that are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, there is some kind of efficiency problem up the pipeline. Its the old Janitor Problem in a different guise; a janitor at a building needs to perform a thousand small dissimilar tasks, inefficiently and often in impractical order, because the building itself was inefficiently designed. Hence why we still haven’t found a way to automate a janitor, because for that we would need to redesign the very concept of a “building”, and for that we would need to optimize how we build infrastructure, and for that we would have to redesign our cities from scratch… etc, until you find out we would need to build an entire new civilization from ground up to, just to replace one janitor with a robot.
it still hints at a gross inefficiency in the system, just one not easily fixed.
There are also some mental issues among people who know about AI safety concerns, but are not researchers themselves and not even remotely capable of helping or contributing in a meaningful way.
I for one, learned about the severity of the AI threat only after my second child was born. Given the rather gloom predictions for the future, Im concerned for their safety, but there does not seem anything I can do to ensure they would be ok once the Singularity hits. It feels like I brought my kids to life just in time for the apocalypse to hit them when they are still young adults at best, and irrationally, I cannot stop thinking that Im thus responsible for their future suffering.
I noticed I also recall conversations, podcasts etc better if I was doing some kind of a manual task at the same time (like woodcarving, or just doing the dishes). My interpretation is that focusing on a conversation while immobile is under-stimulating, and thus causes the mind to wander. If one is walking, or doing something physical, its enough physical stimulation to let the mind focus on the conversation in a “railroaded” fashion, without self-distraction.
Even deeper: it feels great to match your walking/activity pace to the emotional message of the conversation. I suppose it triggers the same reaction as ASMR. I suppose its because it lets us “act out” our emotional reaction to the words, without inappropriate gesticulation etc.
Further weak evidence that walking helps with conversational cognition:
- plenty of people, without any cultural connection between them, pick up the habit of pacing around when on the phone.
- it was a well known technique among ancient Greek philosophers and scholars to just take their students on a walk, or even a longer trip while discussing abstract subjects. Apparently it worked very well and was done this way for centuries.
- humans evolved to be semi-nomadic persistence hunters. Walking around all day is our natural state that we evolved for, sitting down for hours is not.
OTOH, I have a hunch that the kinds of jobs that select against “speed run gamer” mentality are more likely to be inefficient, or even outright bullshit jobs. In essence, speed-running is optimization, and jobs that cannot handle an optimizer are likely to either have error in the process, or error in the goal-choice, or possibly both.
The admittedly small sized sample of examples where a workplace that resisted could not handle optimization that I witnessed were because the “work” was a cover for some nefarious shenanigans, build for inefficiency for political reasons, or created for status games instead of useful work/profit.
Aside from the obvious reasons already mentioned, I wonder if the reason for the regress was not partially related to compound inbreeding. In most cases when technological regress happens, it tends to coincide with a genetic bottleneck as well, which I have a hunch would make the problems worse.
Its in the ballpark of 50k. I support a family of 4 on 10k a year, round-ish. I can save about 1k-2k a year, If we live on a very, very tight budget. It would thus take me a century to pay for cryonics just for my immediate family, if the prices do not fall quickly enough.
In Rand’s defense, she does define the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
Every human being is selfish, but most are also altruistic some of the time
What, in your estimation, would be a difference between actual altruism, and “altruism” done for the sake of selfish emotional fuzzies?
Lets say I pass a beggar on the street. If I give him a dollar because he needs it, its altruism. If I give him a dollar because I want to feel like Im a Good, Charitable Guy, and genuinely enjoy his thanks, then its selfishness.
About the only true altruism I can think of that is not essentially a form of egoism, is when you absolutely HATE the fact that you act charitable, and get zero pleasure from it, not even masochistically. If you so much as get a single second of warm fuzz in your heart from your charitable act, thats just roundabout selfishness. If you pay the beggar 1$ and then feel emotionally better, he is essentially your low-budget therapist, and you just performed a completely selfish act of capitalist exchange.
I truly hope the cost of cryo falls rapidly in the next few years. A back-of-the-napkin calculation I did shows that if I wanted to pay forward for an option to cryopreserve my children (should they ever need it) I would have to save money for over 20 years, skipping on every life luxury for them and myself. It would be a bizarre life in which we would live like ascetic monks who spend most of their lives preparing to die and achieve Afterlife. Uncannily like religion.
If, aside from paying for cryo for my kids, I also wanted to pay for my own, my SO’s, and my parents, my brother etc, I would need to be effectively immortal just to put in enough work-hours.
Cryo might end up being the absolute pinnacle of elitist technology, because if you are not rich and Western enough, you are unlikely to ever afford it, and thus, destined to not only die, but watch your loved ones die as well while average Middle Class people from US or western EU would just chuck their sick loved ones into a freezer with a near certainty of their eventual survival and health.
The religions had it all wrong. In order to achieve Immortality in the After-life, you do not need to be good, or without sin, or pious, you just need to be able so save around 30-80k. If you can’t, well, sucks to be you. Should have thought of it before you decided to be born poor.
One thing I don’t see explored enough, and which could possibly bridge the gap between Rationality and Winning, is Rationality for Dummies.
Rationalist community is oversaturated with academic nerds, borderline geniuses, actual geniuses, and STEM people who’s intellectual level and knowledge base is borderline transhuman.
In order for Rationality and Winning to be reconciled with minimum loss, we need a bare-bones, simplified, kindergarten-level Rationality lessons based on the simplest, most relatable real life examples. We need Rationality for Dummies. We need Explain Methods Like Im Five, that would actually work for actual 5-year olds.
True, Objective Rationality Methods should be applicable whether you are an AI researcher with a phd, or someone to young/stupid to tie their own shoes. Sufficiently advanced knowledge and IQ can just brute-force winning solutions despite irrationality. it would be more enlightening if we equipped a child/village idiot with simple Methods and judge their successes on this metric alone, while they lack intellectual capacity or theoretical knowledge, and thus need to achieve winning by a step-by-step application of the Methods, rather than jumps of intuition resulting from unconscious knowledge and cranial processing power.
Only once we have solid Methods of Rationality that we can teach to kids from toddler-age, and expand on them until they are Rational Adults, then we can say for certain which Rationalist ideas lead to Winning and which do not.
I noticed that the ability to LD is strongly correlated with the condition known as “Maladaptive Daydreaming” (the “maladaptive” part here is subjective and situational, but it basically means the ability and need to have very addctive, vivid, VR-like daydreams that obscure waking reality).
I used to suffer from MD, until I learned to control it well enough to just be benign Daydreaming. Simultaneously, I achieved the ability to LD, which works on very similar principles to controlled Daydreaming.
The trick to LD if you are a person who daydreams visually, is to focus on plausibility. Trying to consciously train your daydreaming mind to enforce realistic, plausible daydream scenarios leads to the same mental need to “fix” unrealistic dreams, which either wakes you up from the dream or makes it Lucid.
Now, all that being said, LDs rarely approach the quality of Daydreams. Its extremely hard to make a Lucid Dream realistic and detailed enough not to feel trippy. Moreover, while most Daydreamers can make their Daydreams simulate tactile sensations, you cannot do the same in an actual dream. For one, erotic Lucid Dreaming is almost always pointless, because your lucid mind cannot force your sleeping body to actually experience sexual pleasure, let alone orgasm. If you are a bio male, it is likely you won’t even achieve erection, so LD sex feels like trying to play pool with a rope.
The only good use I ever got from LDs is that it lets you remember bits of your dreams better and use it as raw footage to edit into your Daydreams.